How Donald Trump Echoes Joe McCarthy

On one of my near-daily calls with my younger brother, who lives in Los Angeles, I mentioned my anxiety about November’s election—and maybe having to leave the country after it’s all over.

“I might just want to have a small apartment in Canada or Mexico or something, just in case Trump comes back into power,” I said.

He scoffed, albeit in a very loving and gentle way. “You know, the worst case would be something like what happened to Grandpa,” he said, pausing. “And you know that kind of made his career.”

What happened to my grandpa, Howard Fast, is that his government deemed him a radical and in 1950 threw him in jail. Howard had been a best-selling novelist, whose books, like Citizen Tom Paine and Freedom Road, explored race, class, and revolutionary ideals. During World War II, he did his part for the US Office of War Information, writing and editing Voice of America broadcasts.

But where Howard went astray, at least in the eyes of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his fellow red-baiters, was that he joined the Communist Party and refused to provide records of an anti-fascist organization to the House Un-American Activities Committee. This was a time of heightened fear and paranoia, just months after McCarthy delivered his infamous “Enemies From Within” speech in which he claimed to have a list of known communists working in the State Department. (And since history rhymes, later McCarthy hired as his chief counsel Roy Cohn, who would go on to mentor a young Donald Trump.)

Howard spent three months at Mill Point Federal Prison, where he began what would be his best-known work, Spartacus. He was forced to self-publish because he was blacklisted, with his epic story of a slave uprising later immortalized onscreen by actor Kirk Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick. So yes, Grandpa became much more famous after being jailed.

When I recently spoke to my father, Jonathan, who is also a writer, he noted that Howard’s appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee made him a household name. “He was on the cover of The New York Times,” said my father. (A front-page Times headline from June 1950: “11 ‘Anti-Fascists’ Are Sent to Jail”). “Before that he was famous, but after that…”

“But it fucked him up, right?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he responded. “I think he found jail scary.”

Howard went on to write more than 80 books before dying in 2003, a year before The Apprentice would beam Cohn’s apprentice into the homes of millions of Americans, helping transform a cartoonish New York tabloid fixture into the image of a decisive business mogul and laying the groundwork for an unlikely path to the White House.

Trump has made vengeance the cornerstone of his 2024 campaign. “I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he told a crowd in March 2023. I wrote for Vanity Fair at the time how dangerous Trump’s behavior was, even as some pundits were writing off his chances of a comeback. He stepped up the menacing rhetoric in a Veterans Day speech. “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream,” Trump said, later adding: “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.”

I was already sure Trump would be terrible for democracy—we watched him sic a mob on the Capitol, after all—and that he had little regard for the rule of law. (The latter was made even more clear during Trump’s hush money trial in New York, where he was found guilty of 34 felony counts.) Not to mention, Trump’s continued demonizing of the media—a.k.a. “THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”—on Truth Social.

But the November speech left me convinced that he would target his perceived domestic foes, with journalists among them. It’s not like Trump and his allies are hiding anything. Kash Patel, a close Trump ally expected to land a key national security role in a future administration, said in December on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

Such a menacing scenario looks only more plausible in light of last month’s Supreme Court ruling giving presidents presumptive immunity from prosecution when carrying out “official” acts—a decision that could effectively put Trump, if elected, above the law. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that, by the conservative majority’s reasoning, a president would have immunity even if ordering “the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.” Since that historic ruling, Trump has raised the threat level by amplifying social media posts calling for Liz Cheney, a Republican critic, to be brought before a televised military tribunal. Trump also promoted a post calling for various political figures to be jailed, including Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Mike Pence.

Now, whether I—a liberal writer, podcaster, and MSNBC commentator—would make such a Trump “enemies” list remains to be seen, and for the record, my second son thinks I’m being hysterical. But it’s certainly not out of the range of possibilities that visible members of the media, the types regularly warning against the dangers of Trump on social media and cable news shows, would be targets of a second administration hell-bent on revenge.

I remember once, when I was young, asking my grandmother Bette about her husband’s time in jail. Toward the end of Howard’s sentence, she said, he started gardening, a peaceful image. She also told me how people used to throw rocks at her window during this period. Bette said that no one felt like heroes when all this was going on. She was raising two young children, and everything felt out of control. My grandmother wasn’t a wildly dramatic person. I knew if she was saying that, it had to have been bad.

Growing up, I was aware that my grandfather and mother, the feminist writer Erica Jong, were of a strange species of political novelist. “Since I believe that a person’s philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an endless series of unpopular causes,” Howard said in a 1972 interview, “experiences which I feel enriched my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life.”

My grandfather truly believed that his political work was the best thing he ever did and took pride in his 1,100-page FBI profile for detailing “every—or almost every—decent act I had performed in my life.”

If I were to seek some testament to leave to my grandchildren, proving that I had not lived a worthless existence but had done my best to help and nourish the poor and oppressed, I could not do better than to leave them this FBI report. In those pages, there is no crime, no breaking of the law, no report of an evil act, an un-American act, an indecent act—and I was no paragon of virtue, and I did enough that I regret—but the lousy bits and pieces of my life are nowhere in those pages, only the decent and positive acts: speaking at meetings for housing, for trade unionism, for better government, for libertarianism, for a free press, for the right to assemble, for higher minimum wages, for equal justice for black and white, against lynching, against the creation of an underclass, against injustice wherever injustice was found, and for peace, and walking picket lines, and collecting signatures.